{"title":"Ground Up Inquiry: Questions and Answers About the Emergence and Development of a Northern Australian Tradition of Situated Research","authors":"Helen Verran, M. Spencer, M. Christie","doi":"10.18793/lcj2022.27.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18793/lcj2022.27.02","url":null,"abstract":"Ground Up Inquiry is the name of a situated approach to researching used by the Contemporary Indigenous Knowledge and Governance (CIKG) team in CDU’s Northern Institute (Charles Darwin University, 2017a). The team partners with Indigenous researchers working under the authority of Elders in their home places. Many of our partner researchers offer research services through Indigenous Researchers Initiative (Charles Darwin University, 2017b). In the Northern Territory of Australia, Ground Up is often contract research and service delivery, but it is also increasingly recognised as an established research method where Indigenous and academic knowledge authorities work together as equals under the aegis of the modern university system. Composed as answers to questions, this paper revisits the origins of Ground Up, and gives an overview of this approach as situated research.","PeriodicalId":43860,"journal":{"name":"Learning Communities-International Journal of Learning in Social Contexts","volume":"44 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89379395","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Child Mortality, Fertility and Poverty: A Counterfactual Analysis","authors":"A. Hyder, Wali Ullah","doi":"10.18793/lcj2022.27.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18793/lcj2022.27.05","url":null,"abstract":"Larger sizes of households tighten the resources of families particularly those in lower wealth quintiles. Households in poorer quintiles are trapped into high child mortality. The risk of child survival leads to high fertility and little investment in children. The conditions to pull these households from this malicious trap are already absent. For instance, the indicators like, women’s low rates of education, early marriages and early pregnancies, and too little birth intervals are very discouraging in Pakistan. Unfortunately, households in poorer quintiles are the least beneficiaries from national revenues and policies in developing countries, in general, are designed for general public and benefit from those policies rarely reach to most needy households. The objectives of this paper are: (i) to emphasize the changing dynamics of fertility behavior and incidence of child mortality across the wealth distribution through an empirical investigation of five wealth quantiles, (ii) to explore the causal relationship between under 5 child mortality and fertility, and finally to examine the counter effect of a few policy instruments. For this purpose, the paper exploits the latest Pakistan Demographic Health Survey to examine few important policy variables to break the nexus between poverty, child mortality and high fertility. The counterfactual analysis suggests marginal improvement in a few variables; like female education, delay in first conception and incremental increase in birth intervals if in targeted households, will significantly change the child mortality and fertility rates. The analysis will be helpful for designing interventions. This analysis can also provide guidelines for women centered institutions like Banazir Income Support Programme, federal and provincial mother and child health departments and family planning offices.","PeriodicalId":43860,"journal":{"name":"Learning Communities-International Journal of Learning in Social Contexts","volume":"143 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74246718","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Undoing Theory: Walking of Arrernte Country – Co-creating Knowledge and Meaning in Central Australia","authors":"Wendy L. Cowan","doi":"10.18793/lcj2022.27.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18793/lcj2022.27.03","url":null,"abstract":"Can educators and researchers rethink what theory does in public education so as not to repeat colonial theories and policies predicated on mis/conceptions of “terra nullius” and “terra incognita”? My initial concern as a teacher and administrator working in Northern Territory for over two decades, was the question: “What theories underpin public education policy directives and implementation plans?” Recently my focus has shifted to include what theory is and what it is doing in shaping whose lives (human and non-human) matter. The shift occurred because many theories appeared to perpetuate “more of the same” outcomes, specifically for Indigenous students and their communities. The shifts from what theory is to what theory is doing in the world occur through the daily rhythms – as a precedent of Arrernte practices – of walking Country. Through quotidian acts of walking, I begin to understand that theory is the inseparability of being, doing and thinking, what Barad’s agential realism calls “ethico-onto-epistem-ology”. To show how walking of country is doing theory, I diffractively read several texts (including the non-English and poetic). This gives a sense of what theory is doing in and of the specific matters it inhabits: Arrernte Country, colonisation, education policy directives, walking and creative expression. Theory is taken up through the ethics of those lives rendered un/thinkable, in/visible in public education in Mparntwe (Alice Springs). A diffractive approach in this context opens theory up, to express thinking differently with the commitment to unsettle education policy as a continued reflection of ongoing colonisation.","PeriodicalId":43860,"journal":{"name":"Learning Communities-International Journal of Learning in Social Contexts","volume":"52 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88075579","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Stephen Bolaji, S. Anyama, Olabisi Kuteyi-Imonitie, O. Ibilola, S. Jalloh
{"title":"Hear it From the Horses’ Mouth: Listening to African Professionals in Australia","authors":"Stephen Bolaji, S. Anyama, Olabisi Kuteyi-Imonitie, O. Ibilola, S. Jalloh","doi":"10.18793/lcj2022.27.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18793/lcj2022.27.04","url":null,"abstract":"The study investigated the growing concern of the African professionals who arrived in Australia since 2007. The ongoing concern was based on the lack of job opportunity in their nominated skilled occupation in post arrival in Australia. The study used demographic questionnaire and semi-structured interview to elicit information from forty (40) participants from Western Australia and Northern Territory cities and regional areas. The data analysed provided the needed perspectives about the extreme frustration of the African skilled migrants lack job opportunities in the post arrival in Australia. Based on the findings, the study made some recommendations, including counselling implications on several pathways on how African professionals could gain recognition for opportunities in their professional areas.","PeriodicalId":43860,"journal":{"name":"Learning Communities-International Journal of Learning in Social Contexts","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78010184","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Editorial: Working with multiple knowledges in Australia’s top end","authors":"C. Bow, L. Norrington, Helen Verran, M. Christie","doi":"10.18793/lcj2020.26.01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18793/lcj2020.26.01","url":null,"abstract":"• Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim.","PeriodicalId":43860,"journal":{"name":"Learning Communities-International Journal of Learning in Social Contexts","volume":"37 1","pages":"2-5"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2020-11-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75654181","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Working together: a story-based approach","authors":"L. Norrington, Jangu Nundhirribulla","doi":"10.18793/lcj2020.26.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18793/lcj2020.26.06","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43860,"journal":{"name":"Learning Communities-International Journal of Learning in Social Contexts","volume":"54 1","pages":"34-38"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79092298","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On gravel – socio-material objects of northern development","authors":"Kirsty Howey","doi":"10.18793/lcj2020.26.07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18793/lcj2020.26.07","url":null,"abstract":"Wealth from extractive development has been at the forefront of political aspirations for the Northern Territory of Australia (NT), and of northern Australia more broadly, for many decades. According to political, bureaucratic and industry rhetoric, the north is insufficiently developed to reach its full potential. The most recent iteration of this development agenda has been catalysed by the Commonwealth Government’s White Paper on “Developing the North”. Eschewing the usual frames for analysing ‘development,’ this paper proposes that northern development can be seen as a going on together doing differences with development “objects.’ It mobilises a ground-up STS to understand what such objects are in an unorthodox way, as socio-material entities. The entities the paper focuses on are gravelly; gravelly roads, and legal contracts that concern gravel. Northern development certainly requires that these two entities, very different though they are, must go on together. But seeing that necessity, we also see that a third gravelly entity, often obscured, needs to be foregrounded to understand what is also at stake in northern development projects. The ‘people-places’ that are gravel pits need to be explicitly involved as objects if northern development is to be inclusive, and is to disrupt the dominant power relations within which it is enmeshed. As socio-material entities, the places that are the gravel pits, intimately involved with gravelly roads and legal contracts, are about gravel supply. Yet they are owned by Indigenous landowners. These places are constituted in quite different institutions, alternative and diverse languages, and in disparate knowledge traditions, compared with those that constitute the gravelly roads, and the legal contracts concerning gravel. The paper argues that all three are ‘northern development objects,’ and all need to be involved in northern development policy. Introduction: on gravel In recent years, buoyed by the release by the federal Coalition government of a ‘White Paper’ on developing northern Australia in 2015 (Australian Government, 2015), a raft of NT and Commonwealth government agencies have worked furiously towards a common goal of ‘Developing the North.’ The objectives of these development imperatives can nonetheless be slippery, particularly in the underpopulated NT where according to the NT Government a “large undeveloped land mass” has yet to reach its “full potential.”1 But typically, the agenda 1 https://business.nt.gov.au/investment-and-major-projects/investment-and-development/northern-australia-development. 41 Learning Communities | Special Issue: Collaborative Knowledge Work in Northern Australia | Number 26 – November 2020 involves the establishment of large-scale mining and petroleum operations, pastoralism, agriculture and aquaculture, and can also involve state exploitation of land, including for defence training purposes, and infrastructure such as housing, dams or roads. Such projects are p","PeriodicalId":43860,"journal":{"name":"Learning Communities-International Journal of Learning in Social Contexts","volume":"10 1","pages":"40-49"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80687680","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A story about stories: reflexivity in a conversation with a student of public policy","authors":"Greg Williams","doi":"10.18793/lcj2020.26.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18793/lcj2020.26.05","url":null,"abstract":"What happens when just an ordinary interaction with a student shifts your whole perspective on things? A routine conversation as course coordinator with one of our post-graduate public policy students took an interesting and insightful turn recently, and our interaction brought to light for me the importance of storytelling and the holding of disconcertment in the reflexive doing of difference, even in places where you would least expect it. Instead of holding a conversation where our words and stories acted upon each other from a distance, in this instance, I experienced the experience of inhabiting the conversation. I experienced knowing in action; a doing of knowing, where the participants, the stories and the tensions and vulnerabilities that attend our stories are inextricably linked together and embodied in the constituent act of being the conversation. Although I have engaged in complex and insightful discussion on many occasions, this conversation, seemingly unremarkable at its outset, caught me off guard. It drew me into a process entirely unexpected, constituted through the inhabiting of the experience and the reflexive opportunities it presented. This paper seeks to describe and provide some analysis of this ‘experience of an experience’ with a view to understanding something more of the processes of ‘knowing in action’ and its role in skilling us to work better with difference.","PeriodicalId":43860,"journal":{"name":"Learning Communities-International Journal of Learning in Social Contexts","volume":"144 1","pages":"28-33"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86755677","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Everyone and everything is a boundary object – an empirical account from a modest human boundary object","authors":"Yasunori Hayashi","doi":"10.18793/lcj2020.26.09","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18793/lcj2020.26.09","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, I grapple with the application of a boundary object, in its position at the centre of a cross-cultural project in Indigenous northern Australia involving discrete knowledge communities—Yolŋu Indigenous landowners and hydrogeologists engaging in the hope of developing a community-led water management plan. Although I was officially assigned as a community engagement officer and a language translator, I found myself becoming a boundary object, comparable to a three-dimensional map of Aboriginal land. My positionality was considerably unsettling at times due to a culmination of disconcertments surfacing from my figure as a knower adopted into Yolŋu kinship system, as modest kin to the Yolŋu Aboriginal landscape of land and people. As a witness to the ways in which Yolŋu family live and care for their environment with the absence of centrality, I extend the notion of boundary object to the central understandings of Yolŋu kinship practice, where everyone and everything is a boundary object.","PeriodicalId":43860,"journal":{"name":"Learning Communities-International Journal of Learning in Social Contexts","volume":"4 1","pages":"58-63"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84971382","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Stories, movement and country: living and learning together in northern Australia","authors":"Matthew Campbell","doi":"10.18793/lcj2020.26.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18793/lcj2020.26.04","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43860,"journal":{"name":"Learning Communities-International Journal of Learning in Social Contexts","volume":"43 1","pages":"22-26"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84548717","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}